As usual with reports like this the reader is left without enough information to determine whether the science is real or junk. N=17 suggests the latter. They tested 250 genes, they're likely to get one that appears significant due simply to random chance.

And then there's the causality. I can prove that bald spots are more likely to have sunburns than hairy spots. Doesn't mean sunburn causes baldness. Nor does it mean baldness causes sunburn.

"The Costanza" hairline looks really, really, really, awful. Except when it is grey and kept short. Then it looks distinguished. I think that Patrick Stewart would look horrible with a full head of hair. And now that I am at the point where I am more grey than black I think I will pass on a cure for baldness.

Mock26:"The Costanza" hairline looks really, really, really, awful. Except when it is grey and kept short. Then it looks distinguished. I think that Patrick Stewart would look horrible with a full head of hair. And now that I am at the point where I am more grey than black I think I will pass on a cure for baldness.

Patrick Stewart discusses losing his hair. After dealing with comb-overs for too long, a friend and his wife tackled him, and forcibly cut it off with Patrick screaming.

What to do?It's so easy now..just clip it very short and look distinguished - the grey helps.Or get hair again and have to worry about what style to wear? But my old hair was so lovely and thick and wavy!

Benevolent Misanthrope:And still no cure for AIDS. Or Cancer. Or Multiple Sclerosis. Or Cystic Fibrosis. Or Diabeetus. Or even the common farking cold.

Researchers are like everyone else. Just like some people want to be doctors or chefs or librarians, medical researchers like working on lots of different problems. And having more people working on a problem that already receives lots of attention (like AIDS), doesn't necessarily lead to better results. And if you have lots of people working on different problems creates crossover as they discover solutions that help other researchers. What if this treatment later provides a breakthrough in treatment of skin cancer?

Happy Hours:I'm not really worried about that. Going bald might even be a blessing. I just don't like barbers. My hair is long enough that it sometimes interferes with my eating habits.

It must suck to get sunburned on your head, but getting sunburnt on your face isn't so great either.

If going bald would be a process that is over in a year, I wouldn't mind so much. However, having a bald spot growing ever bigger for 10 years now sucks. You don't really put on sunscreen (actually, after burning my head something fierce last year, now I do) because sunscreen in the hair sucks. And some of us don't like hats either. And completly shaving and looking like a cue ball isn't a solution either.

My father-in-law suffered from the "disease" of baldness and wore an expensive toupee 24/7 as a result. His son went bald and showed his father that being bald was not a disease, and not something to be ashamed of. In fact they actually look hot sporting the bald look. Dad is now "cured". A farking modern miracle I tell ya.

My concern is if this "cure" causes as many problems as some of the others, like the thread a few weeks ago where people taking the "cure" lost their sex drive... As in never got it back, even after they stopped taking it...

Benevolent Misanthrope:And still no cure for AIDS. Or Cancer. Or Multiple Sclerosis. Or Cystic Fibrosis. Or Diabeetus. Or even the common farking cold.

WTF?

Of those, only MS/CF are not curable or essentially completely controllable with a drug regimen.

I mean, you're probably farked if you don't discover you have cancer until it's already metastasized/stage 4, but that's more a case of already being dead and just not having gotten around to keeling over yet than being sick and needing a cure. Short of that, most varieties are pretty well treatable, some even easily so. Breast cancer has something like a 90+% remission rate if you don't wait until you've been feeling sick for a damned year before seeing a doctor.

AIDS can be regulated to almost nothing with a drug regimen that's not all that terribly expensive if you live in the first world. This is why the charity efforts have shifted from "zOMG AIDS will kill us all" to "help cure AIDS in Africa" specifically. Africa, being largely poor, is kinda farked. Send 'em condoms if you've got spares, eh.

The vast majority of Diabetes is insulin-responsive, and we can mass-produce that shiat incredibly easily. It's an inconvenience more than a disability at this point, which is probably good since it can be activated by being a fatass and we live in America.

The common cold can be prevented with immunizations (we don't do it because it doesn't really harm people much, so not really worth the resulting development of resistant strains and the expense to build a vaccine every damn year) or the symptoms easily treated with existing drugs.

The issue with MS/CF is that they're ultimately genetic disorders. So the cures already exist, they're just unpalatable to the current political climate. Some examples would be:

- Sterilize everyone with the phenotype for a few generations.- Genetic screening of unborn babies, abortion of those with the trait.- Retroviral treatments to correct flawed genomes.

Having plenty of options available but being unwilling to implement any of them because eugenics is scaaaary and people are too stupid to realize that genetic engineering isn't going to create Frankenstein's monster* isn't the same as science not having developed a cure.

*Double stupid since Frankenstein's creation was actually superior to normal humans in pretty much every measurable way. I'm all in favor of cinema, but sometimes the people of the first world should consider reading a motherfarking book or two.

//Also stupid because the other literary counter-argument is GATTACA, a movie where the protagonist literally dooms a billion-dollar space mission to probably-inevitable failure by his family not screening his genes and him resorting to fraud to conceal a defect that, again, literally dooms the mission to failure. The film doesn't argue what it seems to think it's arguing, there.

I'm wondering what the world will be like after a reliable baldness cure...

Ladies will remember what it was like before Viagra. Ask your mother if you've forgotten. Once upon a time, as men receded deeply into middle age there came a point when things just... didn't happen. Then your perky young secretary would rub your shoulder and mew some nonsense about "it" happening to everyone while you put your face in your hands and contemplated suicide.

All that changed with the advent of the boner pill. Overnight, every aging businessman in the land was sporting a hard-on that could crack a fastball into the bleachers, and the groans of middle-aged women could be heard above the clouds. That was scarcely a decade ago, yet even now it has become thoroughly engrained in the habits of civilized culture, Can it be long before no woman living remembers a time when every wheezing fogey didn't stride proudly from the shower with a stiffy poking hopefully from below his pot-gut?

So it shall be with drug-gifted hair, O my brethren, so shall it be. Within mere weeks you will see trembling octogenarians with lush ginger locks halfway down to their diapers. Newspaper editors and judges and elder physicists will resemble Dragonball Z characters. Portly middle-aged fathers will coltishly toss their heads, glorying their new-found gloss and body while their mousy daughters weep in shame.

NotSoNiceBunny:As a female sufferer of alopecia, I just hope this is something that can work for women as well as men. While thinning and balding is tough on everyone it's socially worse, in the long run, for women.

I don't think that's true at all. It's socially acceptable for a woman to wear a wig. A man in a wig is a laughing stock.

/most men don't "look better" bald, no matter what baldies and their spouses tell each other.//most bald men look at least a decade older, sometimes two.///"looking older" totally changes how people interact with you, the places it's considered appropriate to go, and a whole spectrum of judgements. It's not about vanity, it's fundamentally life changing, in a very real sense.

heh - I'll sell you mine. Actually, I think it's almost long enough to donate to cancer for kids or whatever that charity is. I'd jut have to get a haircut and I kind of dread that idea. But it's definitely going to the cancer kids when I do...unless you pay me enough to deny the kids. What do you say? $1000 for the hair, $49,000 for the guilt of bald child cancer patients? $50,000 and it's yours. You can dye it if it's not your color.

ShannonKW:I'm wondering what the world will be like after a reliable baldness cure...

Ladies will remember what it was like before Viagra. Ask your mother if you've forgotten. Once upon a time, as men receded deeply into middle age there came a point when things just... didn't happen. Then your perky young secretary would rub your shoulder and mew some nonsense about "it" happening to everyone while you put your face in your hands and contemplated suicide.

All that changed with the advent of the boner pill. Overnight, every aging businessman in the land was sporting a hard-on that could crack a fastball into the bleachers, and the groans of middle-aged women could be heard above the clouds. That was scarcely a decade ago, yet even now it has become thoroughly engrained in the habits of civilized culture, Can it be long before no woman living remembers a time when every wheezing fogey didn't stride proudly from the shower with a stiffy poking hopefully from below his pot-gut?

So it shall be with drug-gifted hair, O my brethren, so shall it be. Within mere weeks you will see trembling octogenarians with lush ginger locks halfway down to their diapers. Newspaper editors and judges and elder physicists will resemble Dragonball Z characters. Portly middle-aged fathers will coltishly toss their heads, glorying their new-found gloss and body while their mousy daughters weep in shame.

Jim_Callahan:Having plenty of options available but being unwilling to implement any of them because eugenics is scaaaary

It could work if all our leaders were Philosopher Kings, but considering 40% of the U.S. would vote for Hitler himself (any conversation about eugenics needs to be Godwin'd) if he promised to lower taxes, hate gays and bomb brown countries we should avoid eugenics, at least, on any kind of mandatory level.

Bungles:NotSoNiceBunny: As a female sufferer of alopecia, I just hope this is something that can work for women as well as men. While thinning and balding is tough on everyone it's socially worse, in the long run, for women.

I don't think that's true at all. It's socially acceptable for a woman to wear a wig. A man in a wig is a laughing stock.

/most men don't "look better" bald, no matter what baldies and their spouses tell each other.//most bald men look at least a decade older, sometimes two.///"looking older" totally changes how people interact with you, the places it's considered appropriate to go, and a whole spectrum of judgements. It's not about vanity, it's fundamentally life changing, in a very real sense.

It's probably been a good 15 years at least - remember Bob Dole was pitching the little blue pills almost as soon as he lost the '96 election.....wouldn't it have been so clever of me if I had misspelled election by replacing the 'l' with an 'r'?

Back then ED was a serious problem for Republicans. I guess it still is. I just can't see taking boner drugs though. Once my penis is too tired, I'm gonna just let it rest.

Benevolent Misanthrope:And still no cure for AIDS. Or Cancer. Or Multiple Sclerosis. Or Cystic Fibrosis. Or Diabeetus. Or even the common farking cold.

WTF?

No progress in any of those areas, even--getting HIV is still a swift and awful death sentence, no one has any chance of surviving even the most common cancers, diabetics end up dying quickly due to lack of insulin, and the thousands (tens of thousands? millions?) of varieties of viruses that cause the common cold have left a path of death and destruction in their wake.

So, seriously, WTF?

/also, I know I shouldn't expected farkall from a brit trash rag, but I stopped even skimming after they called prostaglandins "enzymes"

fastfxr:Bungles: NotSoNiceBunny: As a female sufferer of alopecia, I just hope this is something that can work for women as well as men. While thinning and balding is tough on everyone it's socially worse, in the long run, for women.

I don't think that's true at all. It's socially acceptable for a woman to wear a wig. A man in a wig is a laughing stock.

/most men don't "look better" bald, no matter what baldies and their spouses tell each other.//most bald men look at least a decade older, sometimes two.///"looking older" totally changes how people interact with you, the places it's considered appropriate to go, and a whole spectrum of judgements. It's not about vanity, it's fundamentally life changing, in a very real sense.

Benevolent Misanthrope:And still no cure for AIDS. Or Cancer. Or Multiple Sclerosis. Or Cystic Fibrosis. Or Diabeetus. Or even the common farking cold.

WTF?

I remember reading an article a while ago that said pharmaceutical companies invested a lot in finding a cure for baldness, compared to a number of lethal diseases. The potential market's enormous, I guess.